The role of investment beliefs in good fund governance

Julius Pursaill, who provides independent governance over assets of around £150bn, argues for the regular testing of investment assumptions.

There are a number of important components of effective governance that have been extensively discussed; independence, effective conflict identification and management, the importance of strategy setting and constructive challenge. I want to argue for a core component of effective investment governance that, in my experience, has been less widely discussed. This is the explicit articulation of investment beliefs and assumptions and the regular testing of these against empirical evidence. Investment beliefs are called beliefs precisely because there is no single universally agreed acco...